Fusion (A Glimpse Behind the Curtain)

First things first . . . Sorry for missing a proper update this week. Things have been really busy at work and home (and with a deadlined art commission), so I haven't had much chance to work on the next page of Fusion. However, so this week isn't a total bust, I figured I'd give you a peak at how I generally handle “pencilling” for Fusion, since I'm a bit unorthodox with my pencils.

Anyway, I got a new phone last week (Samsung Galaxy Note), and it may change the way I do my work. For those who don't know, I don't draw my pencils in sequence; oftentimes I do my pencils (which are almost always EXTREMELY rough with little detail, as you can see above) for each character on separate pieces of paper (which are sometimes covered with various sketches). I scan all of these different pages of sketchs, and then choose the poses from each page that I like best and composite them on a psd file to create the “working pencils” for a page (and I can warp and scale individual parts of individual characters easily this way; so if, say, I sketch the legs too short, as in the image above, I can simply stretch the legs before I ink). With my new phone (which has a pretty good stylus), I can now do my rough sketches on the fly, no matter where I may be. (The examples here I did while my kids played at the mall.) The pic above shows the rough sketch and the more refined rough outline layer of my pencils for a character in 2 panels of the next page of Fusion. Check back next week to see how these very rough “pencils” end up on the final page.

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jamoecw--I still do the cross lines for faces--especially if the head is tilted either up or down. For a lot of characters (here's a big "cheat" of mine), I also have face templates so I can simply cut and paste a face onto the rough pencils instead of having to draw the face every time; I simply change the facial expression from the cut-and-pasted face (which serve as rough pencils) when I ink. (Cut and paste by itself is rarely good enough on its own--it's always important to "re-ink" so that your lines have a consistent quality on a page; i.e., it'd look kinda weird to have two characters on the same plane yet have two different line weights, or--worse yet--a character whose head is a different line weight than his/her body.)